May 27, 2012

Has anybody else seen the 'Christian Mingle' ads? They're aimed at 'singleChristians' and their tagline is 'find God's match for you'.... I may be getting cynical here, but this seems like a multitude of disasters in the making. Drawing people into a dating website for the usual ends of profit is about as old as the internet itself, and naturally such sites have always promised superior matching-up formulae and touted high statistics for successful connections. But the enormous expectations that the Christian Mingle pitch makes for couples who connect through it, well those are simply troubling.

There is something I find subtly nefarious about such a site as its angle insinuates that it is the venue through which subscribers will encounter the bullet-proofrelationship, the one which cannot fail or disappoint because it is personally ordained by their deity. And, at the same time, the message seems to undermine relationships entered into by means more conventional than internet dating, as though by having found a significant other through channels other than Christian Mingle you must be bound to fail because you haven't employed the God-approved way to find the one whom God wants you to be with. It seems to me unfair to target Christians for such treatment, for they are already asked by the profiteers in the more formal religious institutions to accept so much that they may indeed be unable to see through the ad pitch, for will end up with not only broken homes, but with the angst and guilt of believing that the failure of a relationship doomed by improperly elevated hopes is in actuality a condemnation from their deity.

And finally I am concerned for all those non-Christian theists and deists out there, for if God's match for Christians is to be found through Christian Mingle, where are Jews and Muslims and Hindus to find God's match for them? Are they out of luck, not having a divinely established soulmate for lack of being Christian? Or is their deity working through a Muslim Mingle, a Hindu How-do-you-do, a, um, JDate? (Not concerned especially for fellow Pandeists, naturally, since to be a Pandeist is by definition already to have found unnecessary the notion that the Creator of our Universe has set plans for Earth's hairless ape population.)

I suppose since I'm node auditing borgo I ought to do the same for borgette, as sort of a package deal. Okay, actually, I want to node audit Jet-Poop but I just got through some damn big lists and I'm taking some time before I get into any more. Well, except borgo, whose full breadth of contributions I hadn't appreciated until I started digging into it. So if anybody out there has a small number of write-ups, as in less than a hundred perhaps, message me and I'll put them next on the list!!

The essence of loss is the realization that something you once had is now gone. It is essentially the awareness that a fragment has gone, is broken off and become irretrievable. The act of loss can be like smoke, visible, twisting, and intangible. Or it can be like a sudden vacuum, the obvious affront of a missing puzzle piece. In either case, the loss is permanent and something irreplaceable has been lost.

Unique. It is easy to see how the idea of a soul comes about. When you know such is lost. It is akin to learning the existence of that aforementioned puzzle obvious through the absence of that piece. Before you thought it was just a landscape in the countryside, now it's a broken toy. That's melodramatic. Stick to the idea that it's a toy, a childish thing. To be left behind by the healthy adult. Grief makes us children, and subject to a child's sense of drama and pain, which are terrible. A fear forms, and a child clings to fear.

Today I was out for a bicycle ride. Despite that May is one of the prime bicycle riding months in Montana, other commitments have kept me too busy to do anything but a bit of commuting. So today was the first day in a while that I was managing to get up into the mountains. Getting into the mountains of Montana means that my reception would be cut off, and a few minutes before it did so, my phone rang. I picked it up, thinking that perhaps my mother was calling me to remind me of something. But the area code was 559, an unfamiliar area code to me.

I talked on the phone, as well as I could considering that I was getting to the edge of my reception. After a few seconds, I told the person they had reached a wrong number and hung up.

About a minute later, the phone rang. Same wrong number. From what I could gather, the callers were in Madeira, California and had received a phone call from my cell phone 5 minutes ago, and were wondering why. I told them that my phone had been in my pocket and I hadn't called them. We then parted again.

So why is a wrong number on a cell phone worthy of a daylog?

The road I was bicycling up was called Sleeping Child, which sounds like a peaceful enough name. It is named after the creek that it follows, a rushing mountain stream that towards its top, goes through a valley steep enough to be a canyon. I have recently learned that the name "Sleeping Child" was a corruption or alteration of "Weeping Child", which comes from a Native American (probably Salish) legend that travelers in the area would hear the sound of a weeping child. When they approached it, it would seem like a lone, weak child that would come to them for comfort. And would then proceed to start sucking on their fingers, and continuing to do so until their stripped skeletons were all that was left, to be found by later travelers.

Slightly less peaceful and bucolic.

Although the connection is a bit of a stretch, I did find it a bit eerie to have someone calling out to me, even if it was over a cell phone and not as a child's voice in the bushes. And of course, I also have noticed the connection between the legend of the Weeping Children and otherlegends of creatures who are described with the adjective "Weeping" and a noun of something beautiful and innocent, who are voraciously hungry.

So, make something of it or not, that was today's oblique brush with the supernatural.

The Night of my 34th Birthday

I slept for the night on the beach;
There wasn't a bed to be had,
Since Paris was out of my reach.
It was cold, but it wasn't that bad -
I slept in a ready-made pit
And wore all the clothes that I'd brought.
The shirt on my head slipped a bit -
Using clothing as blankets is fraught,
But I slept in the end for some time
And awoke with the first light of dawn.
Washed my hands in the rippling brine
Then ran round in tight rings to get warm,
Sang some songs to the fresh rising sun
About New Orleans and Frisco.
I watched it grow higher with each one,
And bathed in its yellowing glow.

The Morning After my 34th Birthday

I walked from the beach to the street
Where a group of youths called me aside
They gave me some breakfast to eat
And some booze that would warm me inside.
'Mange!' said the drunk Portuguese
As he handed me apples and bread
And once again offered me cheese,
And demanded a song while I fed.
So I drank and I ate and I played
With my new friends who'd been up all night
While the French ones were starting to fade,
The drunk Portuguese seemed alright.
When we left they were still drinking beer
While I felt more like sleep, or else caffeine
I needed to get into gear
This small town was losing its sheen
And Paris was still hours away
If I got the first train, around nine
I should be there soon after midday,
So the timing from there should be fine.

The Afternoon After My 34th Birthday

Well I got there with three hours to spare
I had time to eat lunch and check emails
So I sat down with hardly a care
No idea my plans had been derailed
For my four o'clock lift out of town
I was early at Porte Maillot station
So I spent a while looking around
Not foreseeing the next irritation
I phoned up the man with the car
He said something about how it's 'complet'
My French wasn't getting me far
And he clearly did not parlé Anglais.
He hung up, so I called him again
Paid three euros for each new connection
I plainly was calling in vain
It was time for another direction.
I finally jumped on a train
I just barely had enough money
It was better than going insane
And I wasn't the happiest bunny
I made it out west by and by
And Brittany's lovely in summer
I laugh now, but tell you no lie:
That journey was kind of a bummer.